In January last year, I posted on my goals to ensure that at least 50% of the books I read were from independent publishers and/or by female authors. Convinced that diversity is good for the brain, I aspired to make 20% of my reading choices translations. My analysis, posted earlier this month, showed I achieved on all three, but failed a fourth target of 25% BME authors. So what are the implications, if any, for my reading across the coming year?

Welcome to the fourth and final instalment of my favourite reads of the year. Here I’ll share micro-reviews of my four final favourites (from November and December) along with an overview of all 19. You’ll find links to the full reviews if you’re curious to read more. Plus I’ve got some pretty charts to show how these, and the 147 books I read in total, measured up against the targets I set last year.

I’m rounding off my reading year with reviews of American novels about women in their mid-20s who are estranged from everything, even themselves. While the first owns two properties and the second cleans other people’s houses for a living, they are equally desperately homeless inside. While the first namedrops designer labels, and the second cleaning products, both bring a light touch to the tragedy of feeling invisible and being insecurely attached.

Welcome to the penultimate instalment of my favourite reads of the year with reminders of five wonderful novels I reviewed in September, October and November. This is a short post because I know some people are busy, having ignored my advice on saying No to Christmas!

When the bots at Goodreads urged me to tidy my virtual bookshelves, 2018 still had another twenty days left to run. Plenty of time to edge closer to last year’s pinnacle of 150 books. But since I’ve already passed 2017’s 5-star total of 12 books, I’ve decided to share my favourite books of the year in four parts. This instalment covers my reading from January to April this year. Perhaps you’ll choose one of these five to help you say No to Christmas!

I might have mentioned before that I’m something of a traditionalist in my reading. Print suits me better than ebooks and, while I’ve enjoyed novels narrated on the radio, I don’t think I’ve ever chosen an audiobook in preference to text. Regarding the content, while I relish originality, novelty for its own sake can be a turnoff. Post-modernism gives me the shivers. So I was surprised to read three novels in as many months with footnotes. Is this a new trend?

A recent comment from Norah Colvin got me wondering (as they often do): how many countries had I visited recently in the pages of a book? Perhaps I’d set myself a reading goal for next year: around the world in eighty books! As a comparison (or perhaps as a way of avoiding knuckling down to some real work), I thought I’d check where I’d travelled so far this year. Omitting mainland UK and the USA, where I find myself all too often, I’m not even halfway to eighty, but it’s nevertheless a spread.

I failed last month to meet my modest target of at least 50% of my reviews being of books by women. Speculating on the possible reasons, I noticed a preponderance of male authors among the novels in translation coming my way. If I were better orientated to time, you’d be forgiven for suspecting my lousy support of female authors was no accident, providing the perfect teaser for today’s post for women in translation month, revisiting the qualifying novels I’ve reviewed since August last year.

Too few novels recreate the reality of the working environment, so hurrah for another two about women at work. From a contemporary Japanese supermarket to a library in a late 50s English country town, these depict women who take their work identity very seriously indeed. But the arrival of a man, alongside their own passion for the work, brings complications. Can Keiko and Sylvia hold onto their jobs?

I’m a woman. I enjoy novels written by women. Indeed, some of my favourite authors are women, such as Margaret Atwood, Carol Shields, Ann Patchett, Alison Moore. Six of my favourite reads from last year were written by women. So I don’t need to check whether female authors are fairly represented in my reading and reviewing, do I? It’ll just happen, in the natural way of things.

Book groups are great because you get to read stuff you wouldn’t ordinarily choose. But groups are a pain because you feel obliged to read stuff you wouldn’t ordinarily choose. Sometimes it’s a pleasant surprise. Sometimes it confirms your prejudices. But best of all is when it takes you back to a book you thought you knew only to find you’ve completely changed your mind about it.

4. While I believe there’s room for a touch of humour in almost any topic, I don’t like comedic takes on tragic situations unless, like The First Bad Man, it’s really dark and over the top. Apparent denial of desperation and devastation can really freak me out.

While these two points still hold for me as a reader, I’m not sure I can identify exactly where the balance lies for me between dark and light, either in relation to what I want from a novel or in how to find it.

While I’m neither a reader nor a writer of poetry, I do appreciate that the shape of the lines on the page matters, the white space almost as important as the words. But does something similar apply to fiction? Do we need wide margins and paragraph breaks to give the sentences space to breathe?

If I’m lower on reviews this month, blame my book group! We’ve been ploughing through a Russian novel that gets mentioned in the same breath as War and Peace, although Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate was written in the twentieth century and concerns a war still within living memory. An epic tale of the human costs on both sides of the Battle of Stalingrad, it’s a fine achievement in its scope and in exposing the similarities between totalitarian states across the ideological divide. As with a short story collection recently smuggled out of North Korea, it faced a turbulent journey to publication, having been confiscated by the KGB on completion in 1960 and not published until twenty years later, long after the author’s death. But am I glad to have read it? I can’t honestly say I am.

I couldn’t resist pairing these recently published, unconventionally structured, debut novels about relationships: their intriguing one-word titles are almost interchangeable, with Alice in Asymmetry magnetically drawn to (and later repulsed by) her much older lover and the mother-daughter relationship explored in Magnetism inherently asymmetrical. My reading experience of both was mixed, strongly engaging with the second halves significantly more than the first. See what you think.

Two novels featuring women, scarred by life, who have kept themselves slightly aloof. Of the two, Eleanor Oliphant is the most damaged, but small acts of kindness, along with a crush on a self-centred musician, might bring her out of her shell. Upstate is perhaps more realistic in confronting the difficulty of change, even though, when we first meet Vanessa Querry she’s no longer lonely as she’s fallen in love. Eleanor gets the better therapist; but is either of these women completely fine?

I’ve registered for the Goodreads challenge for a fifth year and, although my totals have increased year-on-year, I’m sticking to a goal of 100 books. Even though it’s hardly a challenge to curl up with a novel most evenings, in a business that is mostly about failing, why not give myself a target I know I can beat? Besides, this isn’t a marathon. Reading is more about the experience than a numbers game. That’s why I’m setting myself some specific targets in relation to quality and diversity, building onmy analysis of 150 books read in 2017.

I’ve read 150 books this year (the image shows only a selection); according to Goodreads that’s 40,927 pages, with an average rating of 3.5. That’s slightly more books, but fewer pages, than last year. All but nine of this year’s reads were fiction, of which 19 (13% – slightly down on last year) are translations. An analysis of my first 100 reads found 71% were from independent publishers. Enough with the figures, let’s take a closer look at the year’s overall favourites.